The nature of the underwriting process for life insurance includes a number of factors which limit the ability to sell policies online. For example, some providers may require collecting samples of bodily fluids to assess an applicant's health status. Furthermore, even providers who do not require such samples are at risk of receiving fraudulent answers to personal and/or health-related questions, such as the applicant falsely claiming to be a non-smoker. Prior attempts to solve these problems include not selling high-benefit policies online, proxying the desired medical information with advanced statistical techniques using data from other sources, and pricing potential fraud into future policies.
Also, machine vision techniques have been employed to extract health-related information from images of people. For example, one machine vision platform is able to diagnose certain medical conditions based upon analyses of images from diagnostic imaging tools, such as an X-ray, a CT scan, and/or an MRI scan. The computer's diagnoses may even be able to identify certain conditions at earlier stages than doctors could identify them in some situations.